A few years ago I traveled with my family on a cruise ship that passed through the Panama Canal. It was fascinating to watch the canal employees board the boat and guide it into the locks. My favorite moment came at dinnertime, when we saw the canal officers deliver meals to the employees on our boat by dangling the Styrofoam containers from the tow ropes. Ingenious!
Because the locks for the Pacific-bound boats are parallel to those for the Caribbean-bound shipping, we got an up-close view of a Panamax freighter traveling in the opposite direction. They’re called Panamax ships because they’re built to the maximum size that the canal can handle. The width of the boat is just a few feet less than the width of the lock. The canal employees tie the freighter to “mule” locomotives that run on both sides of the lock and very carefully pull the ship into the giant “bathtub.” The hull passes so close to the bathtub’s concrete walls, you can almost hear it scraping.
While observing this process, I glimpsed an indentation in one of the concrete walls. It was a vertical notch, maybe three feet wide and a couple of feet deep, with a steel ladder running up the length of it. I supposed it was there for safety reasons; if someone fell into the bathtub, he could swim to the ladder and climb out. Then I imagined what would happen if someone was clinging to that ladder while a Panamax freighter slid into the lock, its barnacle-crusted hull passing just inches from his nose. That would be a cool scene, I thought. Somehow or other, I have to put it into one of my books.
It took a while but I finally managed to do it. The scene appears in my next thriller, Extinction, which comes out in a few weeks. I’m betting that all thriller writers have epiphanies like these, when you imagine a terrible peril and instead of saying to yourself, “Oh stop, you’re being morbid,” you resolve to write about it. Am I right or wrong?
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